Early Medieval Govan

Posts Tagged ‘Strathclyde’

From the late ninth century to the mid-eleventh, when Govan was the chief ceremonial centre of the kingdom of Strathclyde, the king and his family probably spent their Christmases there. As the second most important date in the Christian calendar, December 25th was an opportunity for Dark Age monarchs to display their religious credentials. It was a day when the entire royal entourage or court, comprising all the chief nobles and senior clergy of a kingdom, gathered together for a solemn mass. In Strathclyde, this Christmas service would normally have taken place in the ancient church where Govan Old stands today. The mass would have been followed by a suitably lavish festive feast, perhaps at the royal hall across the river in Partick. We know of one year, however, when the king of Strathclyde spent Christmas in another land, far from the familiar fields of his own country.

The king in question was Owain, whose reign spanned the 920s and 930s – one of the most turbulent periods in Britain’s history. We first hear of him in 927, when he attended a meeting of important leaders at the River Eamont near Penrith. The meeting was summoned by Athelstan, king of England, the most powerful ruler in Britain at that time. Athelstan’s ambitions surpassed even those of his illustrious grandfather Alfred the Great, for he wanted to be acknowledged as ruler of the whole of Britain, from Orkney to Cornwall. He wanted all other folk – English, Welsh, Scots, Viking settlers and Strathclyde Britons – to recognise him as their overlord. Needless to say, not everyone was happy to oblige, but it may have seemed easier to just go along with his lofty ideas, at least for a while. At the meeting beside the River Eamont in 927, a number of prominent rulers – King Owain of Strathclyde, King Constantin of Alba (Scotland), King Hywel (from South Wales) and the English lord Ealdred of Bamburgh (in Northumbria) – all gave their pledge to Athelstan. They seemingly swore an oath of friendship with him, promising not to get too cosy with his Viking enemies.

The pact of peace seems to have endured for seven years until, in 934, Constantin of Alba and Owain of Strathclyde incurred Athelstan’s wrath.They broke their pledge, so Athelstan marched north to reassert his authority. With him on this expedition were Hywel and other Welsh kings, each leading a warband to bolster the English army. In a remarkable display of military power, Athelstan led his troops as far north as Aberdeenshire, while his fleet raided in Caithness. Both Constantin and Owain eventually surrendered, the price of their defeat being an oath of allegiance to Athelstan. Like the Welsh kings they now became his vassals or ‘under kinglets’ (Latin: subreguli). Henceforth, their kingdoms had to send regular tribute-payments to England while they themselves were obliged to attend the English court. How often they travelled south is unknown but we know of at least a couple of occasions when they were among Athelstan’s entourage, either together or singly. In 935, for instance, they were both present at Cirencester in Gloucestershire, for their names appear in a list of witnesses to a charter (a document recording a grant of royal land) issued at the old Roman city. At the end of the same year, Constantin was strangely absent when the English court assembled in Dorset, at the city of Dorchester. This was in the heartland of Wessex, the ancestral domain of Athelstan’s family. Here the English king issued another land-grant, and Owain was present as a witness.

The charter in question was dated 21 December, just four days before Christmas, so we can be fairly sure that Athelstan had decided to spend the festive season in Dorset. His whole entourage – family members, chief nobles and senior bishops – would have been obliged to remain with him, regardless of where else they wanted to be. So, too, would the vassal rulers from other lands, the subreguli who owed allegiance. Constantin of Alba didn’t turn up, presumably because he had shaken off the English yoke, but Owain and Hywel and other kings were in attendance. No doubt Owain wished he was spending Christmas in Govan, celebrating the Nativity with his own friends and family, but it was not to be. However, at some point in the following year, he followed Constantin’s example by rejecting English overlordship. These two kings then formed an alliance with the Vikings of Dublin and began to plot Athelstan’s downfall. In the autumn of 937, the three allies invaded England in great strength. Athelstan responded by defeating their combined armies at Brunanburh, one of the most famous battles of the Dark Ages.

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Appendix: The Christmas charter

Charters were usually written in Latin by scribes attached to the king’s court. The majority are records of gifts of royal land to monasteries. A detailed description of the land being granted was normally followed by a list of witnesses who ‘agreed and subscribed’ the grant, each marking his attendance with a small cross. The first name on the list was the grant-giver himself (the king), followed by senior clergy, vassal-rulers (subreguli) and members of the nobility.

The charter issued by Athelstan at Dorchester on 21 December 935 recorded a gift of land to Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire. After Athelstan himself, the most important witnesses were the two leading clergymen in England: the archbishops of Canterbury and York. These were followed by the vassal-rulers, with Owain of Strathclyde moving into top spot in the absence of Constantin of Alba. Hywel, second in seniority, came next. After Hywel the other Welsh kings stepped forward to mark their presence, but I’ve not included them in the extract shown here:

[Translation] I, Athelstan, king of flourishing Albion in possession of the office, confirmed and subscribed this document with the mark of the holy and always to be venerated cross. + I, Wulfhelm, archbishop of the church of Canterbury, agreed and subscribed. + I, Wulfstan, archbishop of the church of York, agreed and subscribed. + I, Owain, under-kinglet, agreed and subscribed. + I, Hywel, under-kinglet, agreed and subscribed. +….

The full text of this charter can be found at The Electronic Sawyer. Owain’s attendance at the English court is discussed in my book Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age (p. 83) and in Alex Woolf’s From Pictland to Alba (pp. 167-8).

The British Isles in AD 935, showing places mentioned in this blogpost.

In the past few days I’ve been working up a new post for my other blog Senchus. I’ll be looking at a controversial topic: the famous battle of Brunanburh, fought in AD 937 at an unidentified location somewhere in what is now northern England. The victor at Brunanburh was Athelstan, king of the English, a grandson of Alfred the Great. The leaders on the losing side were King Anlaf (‘Olaf’) of Dublin, King Constantin of Alba (Scotland) and King Owain of Strathclyde. In the blogpost I’ll calculate the distances travelled by the respective armies to a couple of places suggested as the site of the battle, and then mark the routes on a map. I’ll take the starting-point for each army as the leader’s principal centre of power or ‘royal capital’.

The map below represents an early stage in the exercise. It shows the ‘capitals’ of the main protagonists in the Brunanburh campaign: Winchester, chief power centre of the West Saxon dynasty who ruled most of Anglo-Saxon England in the tenth century; Dublin, headquarters of the most powerful Viking kingdom in the British Isles; Scone, home of the Gaelic-speaking kings of Alba; and Govan, the royal capital of Strathclyde. Two other places are also shown: York, the great stronghold of Anglo-Scandinavian Northumbria; and Bamburgh, an ancient coastal fortress in Bernicia (the northern part of Northumbria) held by a hereditary line of English lords.

Each of these places was a hub of political authority and military strength, and each played a role – directly or indirectly – in the sequence of events leading up to the Brunanburh campaign. Five of the six – Winchester, Dublin, York, Scone and Govan – were the most important centres of power in tenth-century Britain and Ireland. Govan’s membership of this elite quintet has frequently been overlooked but cannot be denied. Sculpture and archaeology confirm its status as one of the major royal capitals of the Viking Age.

A detailed blogpost on the Netherton Cross is in the pipeline but, for the moment, here are three photographs to introduce the cross to those of you who haven’t seen it before.

Briefly, this free-standing sandstone cross is a product of the ‘Govan School’ – the stonecarving style of the Strathclyde Britons – in an outlying district 12 miles from the main sculptural centre at Govan. The low-quality carving and lack of intricacy suggest that it belongs to the later phase of the style, when the standard of craftsmanship was waning. A date of c.1050, around the time when the Strathclyde Britons lost their independence, would probably not be wide of the mark.

The cross formerly stood beside the River Clyde but is now in the grounds of the new parish church at Hamilton. Devotees of ‘Dark Age’ Celtic sculpture could quite easily walk past this enigmatic monument without being aware of what it is. On one side it has a central boss, flanked by two triangular shapes, above an interlace pattern; the other side shows a crudely carved human figure above a central boss which has two pairs of snakes uncoiling from it. Other patterns are difficult to make out but were identified in Victorian times and noted in antiquarian literature. I’ll describe all the carvings more fully at some point.

Although rather simple and unsophisticated, the Netherton Cross is one of my favourite examples of Strathclyde sculpture. It’s a hefty piece, with a weight and bulk that give it an impressive aura. This and the older example from Barochan are the only two free-standing crosses of the Govan School that still remain intact.

Chris Morrison, proprietor of the Grian Press, recently sent me some photos of the Arthurlie Cross, an early medieval monument situated in a residential area of Barrhead in East Renfrewshire. Although only the broken shaft of the cross survives, the clarity of the interlace patterns makes this one of the finest examples of sculptural art from the old kingdom of Strathclyde. The carvings are in the distinctive style of the ‘Govan School’ and enable the monument to be dated to the 9th-11th centuries AD.

I visited the Arthurlie Cross in 2010 and included three images of it in my book The Men of the North: the Britons of Southern Scotland, published in the same year. Readers of the book will recognize the illustration shown below, an excellent drawing of the cross by John Romilly Allen (1847-1907).

For the past couple of years I’ve been working sporadically on a ‘biography’ of the Arthurlie Cross, tracing its thousand-year history as a public monument and exploring the folklore that grew around it. During the 18th and 19th centuries it was used in a more practical way, first as a footbridge over a stream and, later, as a gatepost. The damage it suffered is visible today, most notably on one side where the carvings have been worn almost smooth by the passage of countless feet. In the 21st century we might feel tempted to roll our eyes at such heedless disregard of an ancient monument, until we remind ourselves that it is an integral part of the story. If the cross had played no useful role in the daily life of the local community, it might have been broken up as masonry for buildings.

The Arthurlie Cross is located at the junction of Springhill Road and Carnock Crescent in Barrhead, East Renfrewshire.

I am grateful to Chris Morrison for the photographs. Take a look at the Grian Press website to see a good selection of books on Scottish local history, including reprints of older works. Chris also posts interesting historical info at the Hidden Renfrewshire Facebook page.

Early medieval cross-slab at Govan, re-used in modern times when it was inscribed with the initials A.R.I.R. From Stirling-Maxwell’s Sculptured Stones in the Kirkyard of Govan (1899).

There is little doubt that the kirkyard of Govan Old Parish Church was a burial ground for the kings of Strathclyde from the ninth to eleventh centuries AD. Some of the surviving carved stones may have marked the graves not only of the kings themselves but also of other members of the royal family – queens, princes and princesses.

Although we cannot identify any particular stone as a royal grave-marker, the chances are that the largest and most ornately carved examples represent this category: the hogbacks, the Sarcophagus, and perhaps some of the finer recumbent slabs.

In this blogpost I’d like to indulge in some idle musing on a specific question: how many queens of Strathclyde were buried at Govan? It’s a question that cannot be answered with any measure of certainty, but it’s probably worth a rough guess. I started to think about it a few weeks ago, while writing about a much earlier princess of the kingdom.

My starting-point is a list of kings who ruled the Clyde Britons from 870 onwards. In that year, the old royal stronghold at Dumbarton was sacked by Vikings and the centre of the kingdom moved upstream to Govan and Partick.

Artgal, son of Dyfnwal [slain by Vikings in 872 while being held captive in Dublin]Rhun, son of Artgal [married to a Pictish princess]Eochaid, son of Rhun [king of the Picts c.877 to 889, but may have ended his days in Strathclyde as king of the Britons]Dyfnwal [possibly a brother, son or nephew of Eochaid]Owain, son of Dyfnwal [fought at the great battle of Brunanburh in 937]Dyfnwal, son of Owain [died 975. His queen is the subject of Jim Ferguson’s story The Bride Of King Dyfnwal]Mael Coluim (‘Malcolm’), son of Dyfnwal [died 997]Owain, son of Dyfnwal [died 1015]Owain ‘the Bald’ [fought at the battle of Carham-on-Tweed in 1018]Mael Coluim [a prince of Strathclyde, perhaps a son or grandson of Owain the Bald, he briefly replaced Macbethad (Macbeth) as king of Scotland in 1054. Possibly ended his days in Strathclyde as king of the Britons – maybe as their last king?]

If the bones of the above men lie in the churchyard of Govan Old, then it’s a reasonable inference that their wives are also buried there. This would give us a rough figure of 10 graves of queens, without taking into account the possibility that some kings were married more than once, and without allowing for other variables (such as burial in another cemetery). Unfortunately, we don’t know the names of any of these women.

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Note 1: Princesses
Queens would not have been the only royal females buried at Govan. The churchyard undoubtedly holds the graves of princesses – sisters and daughters of kings – but we cannot even venture a wildly approximate guess at their numbers. Some princesses would have been betrothed to men in neighbouring kingdoms via political marriages arranged by their respective families. Their graves presumably lie outside Strathclyde, and in some cases outside mainland Britain. Others would have been married to powerful noblemen within Strathclyde, in which case their graves could lie in distant corners of the kingdom, far from the church at Govan where they would have worshipped as children.

Note 2: Artgal’s queen
Assuming that King Artgal’s wife was captured at the siege of Dumbarton and taken as a high-value prisoner to Viking Dublin, she may have died alongside him when he was murdered there in 872. If, however, she was released alive (perhaps after being ransomed by her son Rhun) she may have seen out her remaining years at the new royal settlement in Govan, where her grave might even be the first female royal burial in the churchyard.

Note 3: Rhydderch’s wife
Rhydderch, son of the Dyfnwal who died in 975, is omitted from the above list of kings because the historical record suggests that the kingship passed to his brother Mael Coluim. No source calls Rhydderch a king, so I’m assuming his wife wasn’t a queen. In 971, this couple were hit by tragedy when their daughter was raped (and possibly murdered) by the Scottish king Cuilen, whom Rhydderch later killed in revenge.

The title of this blogpost should really be turned into a question: Did a man from Govan become king of Scotland? It takes us into a rather obscure period of Scottish history, a period less well-known than the age of Bruce or the Stewart monarchs, but I believe we can glean enough information to answer the question with a cautious Yes.

Our starting-point is the year 1018, when a great battle was fought at Carham on the River Tweed. On the losing side was an English army led by the Earl of Bamburgh, fighting on behalf of their half-Danish, half-Polish king Cnut (‘Canute’). The victors were the Scottish king Mael Coluim (‘Malcolm’) and his ally Owain the Bald, king of Strathclyde. It was a famous battle, possibly with far-reaching consequences, one of which may have been that the Tweed became the Border between England and Scotland.

Owain and his people weren’t Gaelic-speakers like their Scottish allies. They were known simply as ‘Britons’, and their language was basically a northern dialect of Welsh. It gave us place-names we still recognize today, such as Rhyn-frwd (Renfrew), Llanerch (Lanark) and Glasgu (Glasgow). But the people of the Clyde weren’t ‘Welsh’ in the sense of being ‘from Wales’. Even when their English enemies referred to them as ‘Strathclyde Welsh’, this simply meant that their speech sounded similar (in English ears) to the language of Wales. The Britons of Strathclyde belonged firmly to the North, just like the Scots. They called themselves ‘Britons’, but they also used another word: Cumbri (‘Cumbrians’) which translates roughly as ‘fellow countrymen’.

Carham-on-Tweed is the last battle in which the ‘Cumbrians’ or Strathclyde Britons are listed among the participants. Nor do we hear anything more of Owain the Bald, although there is no reason to believe that he died in the battle. Some historians think he may have been the last king of Strathclyde, and that the kingdom was taken over by the Scots soon after 1018. Others, including myself, see the kingdom continuing for another generation at least. At the heart of the matter is the identity of a mysterious figure called Mael Coluim who makes a brief appearance in history in 1054. In that year, the English king Edward (‘The Confessor’) sent one of his most able commanders, the Danish warlord Earl Siward, to Scotland. The campaign was noted in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

‘At this time Earl Siward went with a great army into Scotland, with both a fleet and a land-force, and he fought against the Scots, and put to flight their king Macbethad, and he slew all that were best in the land, and brought back much plunder, such as no man had ever obtained.’

Macbethad is the historical character behind Shakespeare’s villainous ‘Macbeth’. In reality, he was a wise ruler who knew how to play the tricky game of eleventh-century politics. Having married a woman of royal blood (probably after slaying her husband, his own cousin) he got close enough to the Scottish crown to make a bid for it. In 1040, he toppled King Donnchad (Shakespeare’s ‘Duncan’) and placed himself on the throne.

Fourteen years later, however, he had to face the onslaught of Earl Siward, described as ‘almost a giant in stature, and of strong hand and mind’. Despite being a competent warlord in his own right, and even with a bunch of tough Norman knights at his side, Macbethad was soundly defeated. He fled the battlefield, and probably went into exile, no doubt getting as far away from Siward as he could.

The 19th century actor Edwin Forrest as Macbeth

When the English counted the bodies on the battlefield they discovered Siward’s own son among the slain. A messenger was sent to bring the grievous news to the Earl.
‘Did he receive the mortal wound in front of his body, or behind?’ asked Siward.
‘In front,’ the messenger replied.
‘I rejoice wholly,’ said Siward, ‘for I would deem myself or my son worthy of no meaner death.’

The Scottish throne was now effectively vacant, but Edward the Confessor had already selected Macbethad’s replacement. The English chronicler John of Worcester, writing in the twelfth century but drawing on earlier sources, tells us that Siward ‘as the king had commanded, set up as king Mael Coluim, son of the king of the Cumbrians’ (Malcolmum, regis Cumbrorum filium, ut rex jusserat, regem constituit).

In 1054 the term ‘Cumbrians’ was synonymous with ‘Strathclyde Britons’, so Mael Coluim was a royal prince of Strathclyde. His name, however, is Gaelic rather than Welsh, so perhaps he was of mixed Cumbrian-Scottish parentage. His mother may have been a Scottish princess, maybe a daughter of the Scottish king Mael Coluim who had fought alongside the Britons at Carham in 1018. Did the Scottish Mael Coluim marry his daughter to his ally Owain the Bald? If so, then it is possible that the Cumbrian Mael Coluim of 1054 was Owain’s son, named in honour of his Scottish grandfather.

To be a son of ‘the king of the Cumbrians’, Mael Coluim must have been born when his father was still reigning on the Clyde, at a time before the kingdom of the Britons fell to the Scots. The capital of Strathclyde was Govan, where the royal family worshipped in an old church beside the river, and where they held important ceremonies on the huge mound called Doomster Hill. I think it very likely that Mael Coluim was born at Govan, or perhaps in the royal palace of Partick on the opposite bank, and that he recited his childhood prayers in the church where Govan Old stands today. He may have stood with his father on the summit of the Doomster Hill on days of great ceremony.

Sadly, his reign lasted no more than a year, maybe even less. His position was severely weakened by the death of his patron and protector, Earl Siward, sometime in 1055. In the ensuing uncertainty Macbethad returned from exile, no doubt with help from anti-English factions at the Scottish court. Mael Coluim was removed from the kingship and was either assassinated or forced to flee. If he managed to escape Macbethad’s vengeance, he may have sought refuge with friends in England, perhaps with Siward’s former henchmen. Or he may have gone back to his father’s old kingdom on the Clyde, back home to Govan, to see out his remaining years in what was probably the land of his birth.

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Notes

The events of 1054 involving Mael Coluim ‘son of the king of the Cumbrians’ are discussed by Alex Woolf in his book From Pictland to Alba, 789-1070 (Edinburgh, 2007), pp.262-3 and by me in The Men of the North: the Britons of Southern Scotland (Edinburgh, 2010), pp.191-2.

The main cemetery for the community of Lochwinnoch in Renfrewshire sits high on a hillside on the edge of the village, above the west bank of the River Calder. Among the numerous memorials and tombstones is a strange-looking object known as the ‘Dumb Proctor’ which stands like a sentinel among the graves of the Ewing family. The old Scots word ‘proctor’, a shortened form of ‘procurator’, refers (in most instances) to a religious official. This one is ‘dumb’ because it’s made of sandstone. It does indeed resemble a stooping, hooded figure. To local historian Derek Parker, who described the stone some years ago, it seemed like “a brooding monk silently summoning sinners to repentance”.

‘a brooding monk’

The front of the stone is dominated by a large boss in the upper section, below which is a serpent. Beneath the serpent is a horseman, now much weathered, above a square panel containing five horizontal bars. A report from 1890 described a border of Celtic interlace but no trace of any such pattern is visible today. On the reverse is the lower part of a large human figure wearing a long tunic or robe.
Although the Dumb Proctor was once regarded as mysterious, we now know that it is a Christian monument of the early medieval period. The serpent is the last survivor of a quartet which once formed a cross around the central boss. These creatures symbolize redemption and rebirth, the analogy being the periodic shedding of their old skin. Arranged in a cross-shape they display the Christianity of the wealthy patrons who commissioned the stone. Likewise, the large figure carved on the back may represent the Crucified Christ, by analogy with examples from elsewhere.
The horseman, although now indistinct, conforms to a type seen on stones of the ‘Govan School’ of sculpture. Govan appears to have been the premier stonecarving centre in the kingdom of Strathclyde during the 9th-11th centuries. Artistic styles developed at Govan were disseminated throughout the kingdom, appearing on monuments in frontier regions such as Ayrshire and the shores of Loch Lomond. The area around Lochwinnoch must at one time have lain within the kingdom’s southwestern border, probably close to an interface between the Strathclyde Britons and the Gaelic-speaking Gall Gaidhil who had been colonising Ayrshire since the 9th century. Lochwinnoch lay on an important route connecting the core of Strathclyde to the Irish Sea coastlands. It is possible that the Dumb Proctor was originally placed as a wayside cross along this route, perhaps to mark a boundary. The horseman – a mounted warrior – indicates that this was a secular monument rather than an ecclesiastical one.

The Dumb Proctor owes its current shape to alterations made since its discovery in the early 19th century. It was unearthed in a field on the old farm of the Ewings, who placed it in their garden before re-shaping it as a gravestone. How much of the monument was lost during this process is unknown, for there is no contemporary illustration from the time of discovery. Nevertheless, the surviving portion was correctly identified as the upper part of a free-standing cross as far back as 1890. More recently, Alan Macquarrie proposed that the cross-head was probably similar to others of the Govan sculptural style, such as the still-intact example from Barochan (now in Paisley Abbey). The device of four serpents emerging from a central boss is reminiscent of the Sun Stone at Govan.

A reconstruction drawing of the Dumb Proctor appears on page 17 in the published version of Alan Macquarrie’s Govan Lecture for 2005. This was redrawn by Ingrid Shearer for a new book by Derek Alexander and Gordon McCrae on the history of Renfrewshire. My own attempt at a reconstruction can be seen below. It’s how I imagine the Dumb Proctor might have looked today if it still had its cross-head (in which case I suppose it wouldn’t look much like a proctor at all).

Allen and Anderson’s Early Christian Monuments of Scotland makes no mention of the Dumb Proctor, despite including Renfrewshire’s other surviving monuments of the Govan School. The Lochwinnoch volume of Archaeological and Historical Collections Relating to the County of Renfrew (the 1890 report mentioned above) had recognized the Proctor as an early Christian stone a dozen years before the compilation of ECMS. Were Allen and Anderson unaware of this?